


patch up

by ink_kettle



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: F/F, Past Relationship(s), References to Sex, References to unethical practice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-09
Updated: 2018-04-09
Packaged: 2019-04-20 20:35:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14269026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ink_kettle/pseuds/ink_kettle
Summary: Horus Shrike has been taken down by Talon, and Ana Amari wakes up in a cell, forced to confront another old face from the past.





	patch up

**Author's Note:**

> Wrote this about a year ago. Disclaimer, never played Overwatch, don't know half the stuff about it. This was just for fun.

It wasn’t a bad cell. Ana didn’t qualify for anything fancy – just a simple stone room, metal bars, a chair, a bunk. But it certainly wasn’t bad, even if the camera watching her from the hallway occasionally glowed purple and ruined her rest. Ana stretched out her sore back, wincing at the cracks of her vertebra.

She was getting too old for this. Too old for captures, definitely.  _ What a mess.  _ She hadn’t expected the lace of shock and fury at seeing Widowmaker again, the desire to  _ wipe out  _ the old target that had led her right into the Talon ambush that had taken down Horus Shrike mid-mission. She certainly hadn’t expected to see – well, Moira. And Moira clearly hadn’t been expecting her either.

Ana winced, and touched her cheek. Moira’s nails were sharpened to fine little points. That slap had hurt.

What could she really say? Moira hadn’t needed to know more than anyone else had, except Fareeha. So they’d had sex, more than a few times. Some of Ana’s least stressful memories of the Overwatch days contained Moira’s skinny jumble of bones writhing underneath her on the little pallet she kept in the room adjacent from her lab, hands spasming into fists in the sheets, but she’d never really considered that there would be anything other than scientific curiosity on Moira’s part. She’d never hinted anything to the contrary.

With a gruff, disbelieving snort, Ana rubbed her head. What a time to find out she’d been wrong. And she had been, if the sharp glints in Moira’s eyes before she’d blurred into shadow –  _ new trick, new, vaguely terrifying trick –  _ had been the tears Ana had suspected they were.

_ Speak of the devil. _

“Moira O’Deorain,” said Ana, neutrally, as the woman in question appeared from seemingly thin shadow.

“Ana Amari.”

Moira was the same as ever. Still sliding along in quick jerky steps out of view, concealing herself to watch her subject. She was dressed in a jumpsuit that clung to her, with a labcoat tossed negligently over the top and carelessly forgotten. There was no sign of the menacing array of tubes she’d been wearing on her back.

Ana pretended to loosen her guard. Unarmed.

“To what do I owe the pleasure?” Ana asked with an element of sarcasm. She did wonder though if Moira had come to take advantage of a prisoner and no formal ethical preventions. She was always looking for someone new to test on.

"I work for Doomfist now.”

Moira avoided looking into Ana’s eye, but she was scanning the rest of her with that peculiarly exhaustive stare she’d always had, piercing right down to the bone and analysing what she found there, cataloguing what had changed with curiosity, not judgement. Ana never thought she’d really miss being looked at like a bug under a microscope, but that particular intense stare was bringing back fond memories of other times she’d managed to distract Moira from whatever it was she was working on to gain her full attention. It was both charmingly hypnotic and familiarly overwhelming to be the focus of that much concentrated drive and intellect all at once.

“So I’ve heard,” Ana said dryly. “You’re a scientist. You’ll go where the funding takes you.”

Moira hummed but didn’t respond. Her fingers were flexing, half-reaching, like she wanted to reach through the bars and touch, to ascertain Ana’s solidity. She rocked up on her toes and then linked her arms firmly behind her back, cocking her head so that her glittering red eye watched Ana.

“Make weapons for whoever pays most and lets you do your thing in peace,” Ana continued. “You don't care who they are and what they're pointing their weapons at, so long as it gives you what you need. It's equal, at least. I can understand that."

Ana’s jaw firmed. Understood Moira’s mercenary tendencies? Yes. Condoned? No.

Moira shuffled a little on her feet. Rapidly, she tapped the bars that separated them, her sharpened nails making repetitive little  _ tinks  _ that grated on Ana’s nerves and sore head, but she knew better to show it. Moira was still an enemy operative, and still exceedingly perceptive on people’s weaknesses, when she chose to be.

"I would not have chosen to leave Blackwatch." Moira's dual stare was as arresting as ever. But the eyes were never the thing to watch, with Moira. It was the hands that gave her away, drumming a restless, anxious pace against the bars, then stopping, smoothing, as if she could heal nicks in the metal with a deceptively sweet caress alone. She was being honest.

"The conditions of your employment were better there," Ana allowed. “You’re a scientist, not a fighter.”

Moira's eyes glinted, and she curled both hands around the bars and leaned nonchalantly against it, her skinny face almost able to fit through the gap. Ana resisted the urge to get up and bash her skull against the bars. She was too old to move that quickly anymore, and frankly, she ached. One of Moira's shoulders raised and dropped, deliberately unbothered.

"Talon needed a healer."

"And you needed a convenient lab.”  _ And you were desperate, and no one would take you after Overwatch folded, so you came to them eagerly when they asked.  _ Moira had never had much interest in fighting with the weapons she’d developed. Days that were not spent working were days that were wasted.

"There are things that I must know, Amari." Moira's hands stopped fidgeting, forcibly ruled by her own conviction. Her eyes narrowed, and her body tensed, preparing for a battle of wills.

"I know, Moira," Ana sighed. It was the one thing about her that never changed, that could not be sacrificed. Her desire to know, to  _ understand,  _ to pick apart and analyse and quantify – that was more a part of Moira than her very soul.

"What, no moralising?" Now there was bitterness, sharp and cut off in Moira's voice, and she drew away from the bars, still watching Ana in her peripheral. "No telling me that I'm unprincipled, that I'm a monster masquerading as a feeling being?"

"I don't blame you for being an intellectual prostitute," Ana said mildly, "We can’t help our nature. I just don't trust you."

Moira's hands curled reflexively in, then spread again, the way she did when she didn't quite know how to respond. She linked her hands behind her back again, to keep them still. Her face was smooth. She didn’t seem offended, only – curious, of course, trying to figure out Ana’s angle from a half-turned shoulder.

_ Not a fighter,  _ Ana thought.  _ Doomfist’s an idiot if he thinks he can trust her to watch his back.  _ Moira could only be trusted to serve her god of science, the eternal quest of peeling back the mysteries of life. Ana had understood that. It wasn’t personal. It never was. It was simply what  _ had  _ to be done in order that  _ science could reveal the truth. _

Though, apparently, Ana was no judge at all at what Moira took  _ personally _ or not.

"Do yourself a favour, O'Deorain." Ana squinted at Moira, silhouetted in profile, as skinny and unkempt as ever, still a little too jagged and forceful for the properness of reality, something fey in the blaze of her hair and the intensity of her stare. Not much changed for the years, a few more wrinkles around the eyes, but still that alert, perceptive gaze, still the rake-thin body abused by a will fiercer than iron, devoted to work as passionately as a fasting monk. "Get off the front line before it kills you."

_ Or everyone around you. I doubt they’ll be happy with you if you faint in the middle of battle because you forgot to eat. And by the look of you, I can tell you still do that.  _ Too often, Ana had found her unconscious at a lab bench, microscope slide still waiting to be examined, had had too many heart-stopping moments by Moira’s unmoving body before she’d checked her pulse. She dragged her mind away. That path led down sentimentality. She must not forget that Moira was still an enemy operative, even if she seemed happy to forget for the moment.

“There are things I must know,” Moira repeated. Her words for  _ I have no choice.  _ She looked at Ana again, with that familiar hunger, and Ana stared back warily. Enemy operative. "I would like to know how you lost your eye."

It was the closest thing to polite Moira would come. She would not take the advice, Ana knew, but perhaps she could be glad that Ana had offered it. Or more likely, she knew that Ana would simply be more likely to oblige if she asked nicely.

“I was shot.”

“The report said you died.” Moira’s hands tightened around the bars again, white-knuckled. She drew close again, looming until her shadow blocked the light, like she could fold the steel down like paper. Maybe she could now. Ana didn’t know what she done to herself, now. Would Talon know to watch Moira? To stop her, if she was going to hurt herself?

Ana eyed the purple, greyish dead skin of Moira’s right hand. Apparently not. Did they care?

_ Well, do I? _

“I didn’t.”

“How?!” Moira burst. Suddenly, her body smoked and she blurred through the bars, solidifying half-hunched over the seated Ana, hands quivering down. The wild look in her eyes had spread now, her face was in a rictus of a near snarl.

It was only through years of training that Ana had the reserve to not flinch. Instead, she was able to narrow her eye at Moira, as if she were unconcerned.

“I  _ didn’t,”  _ she repeated, and touched the back of Moira’s still normal left hand. The skin there was cool, the bones thin and spearing against the skin, as if Moira was a maelstrom only barely contained within the tight sack of her skin, sharpened bones ready to snap free like something hatching.

Moira seized her wrist painfully tightly. After a moment, Ana realised she was taking Ana’s pulse, her eyes steady and unwavering on Ana’s. The sharp little glints were back, like firelight on a ruby and ice under a shimmer of moonlight. This close, Ana could see that they were not tears at all, wet and glossy, but knives, knives in her eyes that wanted to know why. 

The dead hand reached up, those poisonous claws raking lightly over Ana’s cheek, and Ana flinched. Moira hummed under her breath, claws deftly sliding under Ana’s eyepatch and moving it to the side.

“Moira,” Ana began, because now Moira had leant in very close, her breath fanning across Ana’s cheek - but of course Moira didn’t kiss her.

“Someone made a right dog’s breakfast of this,” Moira muttered, the pad of her finger probing the scar of Ana’s missing eye. Ana wrenched her jaw away, but Moira caught hold of her in an unexpectedly strong grip. Her thin lips were pursing in supposed displeasure, but her eyes had started to spark and glint madly in the way that Ana had come to distrust as she stepped away. “It’ll barely be a challenge.”

“ _ What,  _ Moira,” Ana snapped, and hated Moira briefly for getting under her skin as she readjusted her eyepatch.  _ Enemy operative,  _ she reminded herself, and bit back a few more caustic curses that would serve no purpose other than annoying Moira.

“Regrowing your eye,” Moira said, eyes glittering but it was never the eyes Ana had to watch, it was the hands, almost  _ twitching  _ with the desire for a scalpel, “I can make us match, Amari. Won’t that be nice?”

The horror must have been written plainly all over Ana’s face. Moira’s body began to dissolve into shadows, but her laughter echoed, and did not die.


End file.
